Partition admission

[vanhooglesnort]

So I guess I should have been more thorough during the test phase, but after ditching Windows completely, I find I need it back again. Can I reclaim part of the HDD for a NTFS partition to reinstall WinXP, or will I need to use the Windows recovery disks, resize THAT partition, and then rebuild my Hardy install? None of the partition editors I have found seemed able to build me a NTFS partition from unused ext3 space.

[Snowhog]

Re: Partition admission

GParted to prepare the desired partition. Format it as FAT32.

Windows XP installer will do the rest, as it will reformat the partition it is installed on.

[vanhooglesnort]

Re: Partition admission

I tried GParted before I posted, and again just now. When I did the Kubuntu install I used the 'guided, whole drive' option. Now I have the primary (/dev/hda1) and the swap (/dev/hda2 extended to /dev/hda5). GParted won't let me resize or change anything...or am I doing something wrong?

[Snowhog]

Re: Partition admission

You can't 'shrink' an existing partition from the left - the beginning of the partition. But, you can resize the partition from the right - the end of the partition - to make it smaller.

The process here would involve shrinking your non-swap partition down as small as you can (to the size of the existing used size). In the unallocated space thus created, create a new partition as ext3 (to match your existing Kubuntu installation) that is at least as large as the 'shrunk' partition. This is necessary as you are going to move your existing Kubuntu partition into the newly created partition. Yes, GParted can do this - I've done it myself on my triple-boot laptop.

Once you have completed this - moving your existing Kubuntu partition to the new partition - you can then have GParted reformat the old partition to FAT32 in preparation for your re-installation of Windows XP.

WARNING: MAKE SURE YOU UNDERSTAND WHAT YOU ARE DOING BEFORE DOING IT. THE STEPS ABOVE WILL RESULT IN THE UUIDs OF KUBUNTU PARTITION BEING CHANGED FROM WHAT THEY WERE, AND WILL REQUIRE EDITING OF THE GRUB menu.lst TO REFLECT THE NEW UUID AS WELL AS EDITING OF THE fstab FILE FOR THE SAME REASON. IF YOU ARE NOT COMFORTABLE OR HAVE ANY DOUBTS, DO NOT DO THIS.